


the importance of keeping your sanity

by Liu



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: ACIII, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Shaun-centric, feels dump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:51:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liu/pseuds/Liu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Strangely enough, coffee still tastes the same, even after months of hiding and running and trying their damnedest not to die (some of them with less success than others, Shaun thinks as he remembers Lucy, who used to be a friend and an ally and now she’s just a dead traitor, a danger taken care of). </p><p> </p><p>((set slightly before, during and a bit after ACIII, contains spoilers))</p>
            </blockquote>





	the importance of keeping your sanity

Strangely enough, coffee still tastes the same, even after months of hiding and running and trying their damnedest not to die (some of them with less success than others, Shaun thinks as he remembers Lucy, who used to be a friend and an ally and now she’s just a dead traitor, a danger taken care of). Shaun wonders why he has signed up for this kind of life; it feels like centuries since he’d had a boring, safe little flat on the right side of town, right side of human existence.

And then he dropped off the grid, stopped all contact with the hundred or so people who made up his life until he started Googling all the wrong keywords, and he holed himself up with all these psychopaths and their crazy end-of-the-world schemes.

And the bloody coffee still tastes just the same, even in a shaky old van stuffed with the tech that would have given Shaun a happy stroke or a horrified orgasm if he’d seen it ten years ago; it’s difficult to drink his coffee when it splashes around in the Styrofoam cup as Rebecca drives at a good twenty miles per hour over the normal speed limit. It just adds to the knot in Shaun’s throat as he watches Desmond twitch and tremble, eyelids stirring as if he’s just sleeping when Shaun knows for a fact that the bloke is halfway to brain-dead.

Shaun watches him; nobody watches him watch Desmond, Rebecca is driving and William is arguing with the way she does it. Shaun is not sure if he wants them to notice or not. Maybe it would be liberating if they called him out on his staring, asked what Desmond can’t. Maybe it would make some difference, at least to Shaun’s sanity, to question once again what the fuck it is they’re doing here, how far they’re going to take this.

To the very end, that’s the answer. Shaun knows; he’s known all along, but it doesn’t make this any less awkward, dozens of corpses left behind them (and one that actually mattered), and another soon-to-be corpse hauled around with them, as if they could do anything more than just watch and try not to pray, because a fat load of good that’s gonna do.

So Shaun does his best to not spill the hot, bitter liquid all over himself and the half-dead guy next to him as Rebecca cuts another turn a bit too sharp, and he watches Desmond tumble deeper and deeper into whatever fucked-up world his brain’s conjured up.

………………..

Desmond wakes up. Of course he does; he’s the hero here, the ridiculous, improbable savior of all, and Shaun resented that before, but now he’s just glad that they’re not one man down again. Shaun knows that the order, the brotherhood, whatever, is not built upon the will or the abilities of just one man, but Desmond has a reassuring way of stumbling into crazy shit and emerging unscathed, or at least mostly capable of marching on like the good purebred soldier that he is. It’s this sole thing that keeps Shaun going these days; the knowledge that a man can go through what Desmond has experienced and still stand, still keep on moving with his head held high and his eyes set forward. William is trained to do so, to keep his insecurities and doubts hidden from the others, pacing like a lion in a cage mentioning duty once too often to be truly, deeply inspiring; Rebecca will fake easy-going and quirky to the last second, but she’s starting to slip up and Shaun can only see the haunted, empty look in her eyes so many times before he decides that avoiding her is actually the thing to do here, and moves his shit to the far end of the cave-slash-temple-slash-crazy-sci-fi-story-setting.

He knows he’s slipping as well: sarcasm has never failed him before, and he does his best to keep up with his own standards, but the end of the fucking world is about three months away, and more often than not, Shaun finds himself wishing for the blissful ignorance of the idiots all over the world who are hoarding cans and blankets and matches by now, all the while not really believing anything’s going to happen.

That’s why Desmond’s important. He’s got the key to all this in his blood, in his brain, and yeah, alright, technically it’s his role to somehow find a way to save the world. For Shaun, Desmond’s importance lies more in his devastating unpretentiousness. He gets out of the Animus, stretches, walks around looking every bit as lost as they all feel, and doesn’t try to mask it with bravado and fake optimism. He comes up to Shaun’s little camp near the shiny hologram doorway, and fidgets and coughs and scratches at the back of his neck, and Shaun can practically feel the tension radiating off the man, but it’s alright: it’s what he feels himself, and to see another human being mirror him like this is… a relief, somehow. More than all the minor breakthroughs, more than those rare times when he stumbles into any useful bits of intel, more than the few shaky hours of sleep they can get in this hole; it’s Desmond who keeps him going, with his questions that get progressively less stupid and more serious and a bit nervous and tentative and desperate over time. Desmond asks shit he has to know an answer to, but Shaun humors him and talks, because it’s been ages since he’s actually talked to someone, and it’s Desmond, Desmond who got to stretch his legs after the long days of his coma just to get stuffed into the Animus right away, who met his father for the first time in eight years (yeah, Shaun knows the history, he has a way of knowing things, hearing what he needs inbetween clipped answers and wary glances) without so much as a pat on the back.

It’s Desmond, and Shaun kind of doesn’t want him to die. There’s the issue of the whole planet dying soon if they don’t figure this out, yeah, but if Shaun were to name a few people on the planet whom he specifically wants to keep alive, Desmond would be one of them. The man bloody deserves it, is what Shaun thinks, as Desmond asks one more question and it’s a little easier to breathe, for a moment.

It gets too much after a while: Shaun talks a lot, but he’s forgotten how to communicate things properly, in this crazy life of his that consists of digging out intel on everything and then burying any spare parts of himself deep inside so no one can get to him. Desmond’s open disregard for the Assassin kind of tact is refreshing, yes, but after a while, looking into the mirror of Desmond’s nervous energy becomes too much and Shaun tells him he’s got work to do, _they_ ’ve got work to do and could Desmond please get back to this thing they need to do. He watched Desmond walk away, his back tense and his fingers twitching at his sides, searching for weapons that aren’t there in this life. He looks like a little boy coming home with some bad news from school, a little bit relieved, a little bit fidgety, like he can’t decide whether he wants to run to the front step or turn away and hide. It takes Shaun a few days of watching to realize it’s got nothing to do with William and everything to do with the Animus, like Desmond lives more inside of that blasted thing than he does in the real world, and Shaun feels a weird, unsettling and misplaced tightness in his chest at that.

He can’t change it, so he shrugs it off and washes down the ache in his throat with cold coffee, two sugars, just out of spite, because fuck it if he’s going to spend the last weeks of his life, of this planet’s life, trying to cut down the expenses.

………………

It’s also a relief when William fucks off to get another power source. It’s crazy, of course it is, but not having the man breathing down their necks feels a bit like before, when Lucy was still around and when Shaun could still be bitingly sarcastic to Desmond without feeling horrible about it.

He also feels horrible about wanting William gone when the man goes and gets himself kidnapped. Desmond goes ballistic at the news, and insists on doing what Shaun mentally dubs ‘The Crazy Savior Thing’. Of course he gets himself into mortal danger, and Shaun’s hands go cold and damp and his foot bounces a steady thumping rhythm into the floor of the van while he and Rebecca stay back and wait for Desmond to once again make things as right as they can be right now.

Desmond comes back wielding the Apple like a fucking god out of some scary legends, his eyes hard and determined, leaving a trail of bodies behind like it doesn’t even matter, and Shaun feels a little like crying out of relief and throwing up at the sight. He does neither; Desmond looks at him, and it’s like he forces himself to focus on this and now and who he is.

Shaun decides that if they survive this, he never wants to see anything alien-related in his life.

In the end, he ends up giving William the stink-eye, Rebecca the finger and Desmond a cup of coffee while he forces his fingers not to shake around the tweezers as he picks the glass shards out of Desmond’s skin one by one.

He doesn’t say anything about how ridiculously stupid Desmond was for walking into Abstergo without a care in the world, how crazy it was to take the Apple there, to _use_ it like that, how brave and unimaginably terrifying. Desmond doesn’t say anything either, about how it had to be done, how no one else would do it and how he’s sick of all this shit.

They both understand what the other means without words. It’s not some otherworldly, soulmate mental connection from the movies; it’s all palpable in the air of the cave now, the being-sick-of-this-shit thing as well as the we-have-to-do-stupid-shit-because-no-one-else-will.

Desmond mutters ‘thanks’ when Shaun thinks he’s got all of the glass out, and leaves the almost empty cup on one of Shaun’s computers.

Shaun stares at it for the next two days, and then knocks it off his equipment and into the abyss, just because the thought of giving the fucking aliens a finger by polluting their precious cave is actually comforting.

He thinks of sharing this with Desmond, but it’s one of those highly private, sad and pathetic jokes that are only ever funny to one person’s mind, and by the time Desmond gets out of the Animus, Shaun doesn’t have the storage space in his brain to even remember.

………………………….

“Would you do it?” Desmond asks when they learn about the aliens’ experiments with keeping their minds outside of their bodies and trying to become immortal, or at least highly durable.

Shaun shrugs, and shakes his head.

“No. Can you imagine how bloody tired you’d get after a few thousand years of this?” he smirks, and it’s a joke, a jab, Shaun Sarcasm at its best, but Desmond looks at him, and just nods, simple and fucking heavy, like he’s carrying the weight of the world and for fuck’s sake, he _is_ , and something shifts in Shaun’s brain and he turns away and waves Desmond off with the excuse of work to do, again.

Yeah. Sometimes, he just can’t stand Desmond.

Maybe that’s why it occurs to Shaun that maybe, he wouldn’t get tired of him.

……………………………………….

They find the key. Of course they do – of course _Desmond_ does. Nothing’s impossible for that ridiculous bastard, is it, Shaun thinks as they walk towards the large, shiny alien doorway.

Maybe Desmond could even make the world align right after all this is finished, he thinks briefly, and gives himself a mental kick for that kind of sappy, sloppy, brain-washed worship of anyone’s existence. Desmond’s just human, isn’t he-

-and paradoxically that’s the thought that makes Shaun shake the worst, goosebumps all over his flesh and sticky, icy paranoia creeping up his spine and latching onto his brain with every step forward.

…………..

It’s not paranoia when they’re really out to get you, that’s the saying, isn’t it.

It’s not paranoia either when you’re horrified of death and the very cretin you’re worried about goes and fucking _chooses_ it, like a stupid, predictable hero-complex jerk that he is.

Was.

These days, Shaun takes his coffee without sugar. It makes the bitter taste in the back of his throat vaguely less inexplicable.

All the caffeine also makes him twitchy as hell. Especially when he doesn’t expect to be touched in a tiny diner in some shithole in the middle of damned Cuban nowhere.

The perpetrator doesn’t sound surprised when Shaun twists his wrist; he chuckles and slithers out of the grasp and slides onto the chair opposite of Shaun, and Shaun thinks he’s finally gone completely crazy, but of course he hasn’t, this is just his life, and he should finally stop searching for any logic or probability in it.

Desmond smiles at him, a little weary and a little haunted, like he’s just woken up from the kind of a nightmare you only describe to a shrink. He also looks like a kid on a trip to somewhere unknown and fascinating, and Shaun knows that look.

It’s ‘I can’t believe the world almost ended’, and ‘We did it’, and a little bit of ‘Was it maybe worth it?’ – and the answer to all those non-questions is ‘yeah’.

So Shaun nods, simple like that, and pushes his coffee towards Desmond. The idiot fishes out a packet of sugar out of his jeans and grins at Shaun as he stirs it into the half-full cup.

“You won’t even taste the coffee, idiot,” he says. Desmond shrugs. And Shaun just kind of lets it go.

 


End file.
